Alone Together
by Karkalicious769
Summary: Karkat hates Dave - he always has, despite the way his blood-pusher hurts at the sight of him. But when you combine two insomniacs with limited space and a love of cuddling, things are bound to happen. Very, very red things, whether either of them likes it or not.


**A/N: Well, I did it. It took two hours and two bowling matches, but I wrote a oneshot. Have some DaveKat.**

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The first thing you ever hate about Dave is his red text. Such an obnoxious, bright color - not too far off from your own cherry blood. You hate it. You hate how he parades it around in every conversation. You could be culled for doing that, but him? The extent of his human teenage boy problems is probably finding a steady internet connection in his poor excuse for a hive.

You've never even been to a proper Alternian school. Your lusus never allowed it, out of fear that you would be discovered to be a mutant for wearing gray instead of your blood color. Everything you know, you learned through web searches or by asking Sollux. Dave's never been subjected to something like that, and it shows in his arrogant personality. You want to slap that fucking smirk right off of his annoyingly good-looking face.

And even when you meet him in person, the red he wears oh so proudly is an immediate assault on your eyes - it makes your blood boil. You want to tear his stupid cape to shreds and claw his eyes out so you don't ever have to see that putrid color again.

It keeps you up at night sometimes - thinking about all the ways you could rid yourself of his presence. If you didn't want to kill him so badly, you might think that you have a black crush on him.

On nights like that, you grumble and pull yourself out of your recuperacoon and into the darkness of the meteor. You clean yourself up as best you can, slip on some clothes and - your hair still dripping with the slime - wander the meteor.

It takes you three sleepless nights to find an observation deck. You stand in the stairwell for a long time, staring up at space flying by with an unguarded expression of awe, before you notice that you're not alone. Dave is laying in the middle of the room, enjoying the show same as you, and you scowl before turning and marching away. You can't be sure, but you think you hear him chuckle, and it just makes you walk faster and stomp louder.

On your fifth trip around the meteor, you find another observation deck. You're not sure how many are on this hunk of rock, and you don't care - as long as they're enough to keep you and Dave completely separated. You lay down on the cold stone floor and drift off to sleep watching the universe pass by around you. If Dave walks in on you, you hope he's as upset as you were when you found him. The knowledge that he probably doesn't care keeps you awake longer than you'd like to admit.

You and Dave play this game of back and fourth for so long that you forget how many nights have passed before you just accept that the meteor only has three observation decks. You get tired of playing cat and mouse with him - you get tired of everything.

So it doesn't come as any surprise when you walk in on him in your favorite observation chamber and - instead of leaving - you simply sit next to him. Dave looks over at you, his face as stoic and as unreadable as always, and opens his mouth.

"Can it, Strider." You tell him before he can get a single word out. "I'm only here to watch the stars and I'm too tired to move. So kindly shut the fuck up for once and deal with it."

Dave closes his mouth and studies you for another moment before nodding, a small smile on his face. "Alright." He says, and you tense, waiting for more, but that appears to be all he's willing to give because no other words follow.

You relax despite yourself, and quickly drift off to sleep with exactly three feet between you and Dave. You'll never admit it - not even to yourself - but sleeping next to him is a lot easier than you had imagined. Maybe it's the fact that his body heat is the only one you've ever felt that's closest to yours. Troll body heat depends on blood color - the higher the blood color, the colder you are. And as a mutant, your body heat is at 98°F on your coldest day. Dave is… almost warm, even with the distance between you two. Then again, you might also be sleeping better because with his dull nails, flat teeth, and absolute lack of hardened body muscles and professional training, Dave is hardly even a threat to you. You tell yourself that it's the second reason, even though you know that it's not entirely true.

Either way, you still flip your shit when you wake up curled into a ball and pressed against his side. His cape is covering you like a blanket, and his arms are around your waist, and you do the only thing you can think to do in that situation. You punch him. You nail him in the jaw, _hard_.

Dave shoots up, instantly awake. His shades are hanging off his face at an awkward angle, just dangling by one ear, and he has a look on his face that's a cross between panic and anger. He blinks once, twice, then three times before he pieces together what happened and glares at you. For the first time, his expression is completely unguarded, and you can't control what happens next. You laugh.

And not a slight chuckle or anything - you laugh out loud, clutching your sides as you fall to the floor and tears stream from your eyes. You just laugh harder at Dave's absolute bewilderment when he sees that your tears are red. You don't know why this is so funny, but you can't stop laughing. And Dave, fed up with it, grabs you by the shoulders and pulls you roughly against him.

Of course, he underestimates both your weight and his own strength, and the momentum sends him sprawling on his back, you falling on top of him. But that's not why you finally stop laughing.

You blink in surprise, feeling how soft his strange, pink lips are against yours. You… oddly like the feeling. You want to experience more of it. You want-

But it's over all too soon though as Dave pushes you off, giving you the same look of confused enjoyment that's no doubt mirrored on your own face. You move first - reaching up to gently touch your lips. They still tingle from the kiss, much to your embarrassment. Dave doesn't say anything - you don't even hear the rustle of his cape when he moves - but by the time you look back up, he's gone.

You don't see Dave for a while after that, and the fact that you can't decide whether or not you like his absence only makes you madder. You hate Dave - you know you do - so why are you so disappointed when you climb to the observatory and don't see him anywhere? You try not to think about him too much. You distract yourself by talking to the others on the meteor or by watching your romcoms or even by practicing with your sickle in your respiteblock. But even then, when your mind wanders, you find that it always circles right back around to him. It's driving you absolutely insane.

It's almost a relief when you walk up the familiar set of stairs, weary from arguing with yourself day and night, and find him sitting there. _Almost_ a relief. You'd never admit to yourself that seeing him brought a smile to your face.

You walk over to him, and even though he slides over so that you have room, you still position yourself exactly a foot away from him. Hundreds of questions rush through your mind, but you don't voice any of them. If he won't talk, then neither will you. He's not the only stubborn person on this meteor, after all.

Your vow of silence lasts exactly three days. You know because you kept count. Each of those nights, you and Dave somehow wandered into the same observatory, fell asleep far apart, and then woke up cuddling each other. You didn't punch him again - you actually just fell back asleep on the third day, though Dave was gone when you opened your eyes again.

When you eventually do talk, you don't mention the kiss. It seemed as though the two of you had silently agreed that it hadn't happened - no matter how vivid the memory is. Instead, you just ask him questions about Earth before the game. You don't know why - maybe you just want to get him to talk to you. It's not as though you've ever cared about his home planet before. And Dave does talk. He answer you with short phrases at first, but as the nights fly by, his answers become longer and longer until he's doing the bulk of the talking.

He even starts asking you questions about Alternia.

You're hesitant to answer some of the questions - especially the ones pertaining to the hemospectrum - but you answer them nonetheless. It's only fair after he did the same for you. Somehow, you even got Dave to pay attention long enough to teach him about quadrants. He seemed particularly interested in matespritship, but you told yourself that his interest was only because matespritship is the closest to his inferior human romance. You don't believe yourself. Especially as the space you put between you and Dave slowly dwindles each night until you and him are cuddling from the second you walk through the door, until hours after you wake up.

And, somehow, as the days turn into weeks, and weeks into months, you and Dave stop talking only at night. You're not sure how but, at some point during your cuddle sessions, you and Dave had become inseparable. You see him all the time. The only time you're truly without him is when you're in the bathroom. And even then, sometimes Dave just lets himself in. You don't really understand that. You always double-check to make sure you locked the door.

Dave is your best friend, easily. You don't know how you could ever possibly hate him. Even his red God Tier outfit has grown on you - you'll sometimes take his cape and wear it around until he hunts you down and wrestles it away from you. His eyes - redder then even your own blood - are beautiful to you. Sometimes, you can convince him to take his shades off when the two of you are alone, but more often than not, you have to accept that he wants to keep them on.

By the time the first year has passed you by, you have to accept that you aren't pale for Dave. He may be your best friend, but you could never be his moirail. You've been deluding yourself - telling yourself that your feelings are pale, not red - for the longest time, but you can't do it anymore. You'll probably never tell him, but you suppose that admitting it to yourself can't do any harm.

This throws everything you thought you understood about quadrants out the window. Sure, you've read plenty of novels and seen plenty of romcoms where the characters go from black to pale to red (not necessarily in that order), but you've never liked those. You have standards, dammit! Those have always seemed too unrealistic to you, but now you're living it. And unlike those trashy romance novels, Dave doesn't return your feelings. At least, if he does, he doesn't show it. At all. You hate his poker face - that's one thing that hasn't changed since the first time you saw him.

You don't know how to deal with these feelings. When you were black for John (or, thought you were, at least) you had jumped the gun and told him about your feelings during what was, for you, your first conversation. You don't want to do that with Dave. You don't want to push him away.

So you push your red feelings for him, instead. You push them deep, deep down inside of you. You bottle them up tight in the pit of your stomach and try your best to pretend as if they don't exist.

By the second year on the meteor, you're driving yourself crazy.

You see Dave almost every second of every day, but you've never felt more disconnected from him. You're quieter than ever, and everyone has noticed. You keep to yourself mostly, letting others talk to you, but saying very little in return. Even Dave can't get you to say more than two sentences. You spend most of your time wrapped up in your subconscious - replaying fantasies over and over and creating new ones when you get tired of those.

You think about the time you accidentally kissed Dave. If you concentrate hard enough, you can just barely feel the ghost of his lips against yours. You imagine how you would confess to him. With another kiss - this time, on purpose - or some grand gesture, or a song, or even just simply telling him. You fantasize about a matespritship with him, how great it would be to be able to kiss Dave whenever you want. And, sometimes, late at night in your human bed, you imagine him and you finally making use of the buckets scattered around the meteor.

You come back to this thought the most.

One day, when you pull yourself from your recuperacoon and walk up to the observation deck, you're more than a little disheartened to find it empty for once. Still, you sit in your usual spot, the ground cold beneath you without Dave here to supply his body heat. You lay back, staring up at the forever-changing night sky as you have so often before, but it lacks its usual luster. You frown.

You hate yourself for missing him. You hate yourself from _wanting_ him. You can't believe you let him get under your skin - get inside of you and actually get you to _care_ about him. It's so unfair. Everything's so unfair. Because no matter how much you hate what you're feeling, you still can't bring yourself to hate _him_. Maybe you never really did.

Footsteps attract your attention, pulling you from your thoughts, and you smile as you see Dave approaching. It's not a pleasant smile - it's a bitter-sweet, my-life-is-so-fucked-but-I-don't-care smile.

"Have you ever been in love, Dave?" You ask as he takes a seat next to you. Dave just shakes his head. Okay, yeah, you kind of deserve the silent treatment. Nonetheless, you keep talking "Horrible, isn't it?" You chuckle weakly. "It makes you so vulnerable. It opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses so no one can hurt you, and then one stupid person wanders into your stupid life. You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it, but then again, neither did you. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't yours anymore. Love eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple things, like their absence or their "simply platonic" gestures, turn into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. Not just in the mind or imagination. It's a soul-hurt. A real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain." You blink, realizing that you've been staring at him this whole time.

Your smile is gone now, and so is his composure. Unlike your sticky-sweet pleasantness though, which is gone all at once, Dave's careful mask slips slowly.

A tear - clear and easy to miss upon first glance - slips down his cheek. It's followed by another, and another, and another, until you're not sure how he hasn't run out of water yet. You scramble to your knees, cupping his face gently in your hands. You take of his shades, and for once, he lets you, pressing his face into your chest while you run a hand through his blonde hair, shushing him softly all the while.

His crying doesn't stop, but then again, neither does your shushing. Just like that first time, nothing stops until your lips crash against his.

Unlike the first time though, he pulls you closer instead of pushing you away. The two of you lose your balance and fall over, Dave above you and his hands on either side of your head.

You don't care - you're too busy kissing him, and he's too busy returning the favor. It's not a perfect kiss like your romcoms always showed it being. Your teeth clash, neither of you is certain what to do with your tongue, and you're both scrambling to be closer - to somehow kiss deeper. And it's desperate and messy and awkward and exactly like you never knew you wanted.

When you finally pull away - both of you breathless and wide-eyed - there's a moment's pause. Dave stares at you, and you stare right back, both of you sizing the other up. Then you both lean in, kissing all over again. His hands are in your hair, and when they brush against your horns, you shiver with pleasure.

"So, does this mean we're matesprits?" You ask against his lips during a short pause.

Dave just shakes his head. "I don't care what we are, so long as we can keep doing this." He says. You find those terms to be incredibly agreeable, and you tell him so. Dave just laughs, and the two of you roll over, laughter bubbling up between your conjoined lips as you worm closer.

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you're really, really glad you don't hate Dave Strider.

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 **A/N: And that's how they became canon.**


End file.
